Richard Spencer

The followers of the Peacock Angel believe they are facing their 73rd genocide. Many are already scattered across the corners of the earth, more are fleeing for their lives from their latest persecutors, and some are dying of thirst on a scorching desert mountainside. The Yazidis have run out of places to call home.

It is not often you can record the moment when an ancient religion's home is finally wiped out. But this week might mark that moment for the Yazidis, one of the most colourful bands of worshippers in the Middle East, a region not lacking in colourful worshippers.

Above all other inhabitants of the fragmented, violent mess that is modern Iraq, they had reason to fear the jihadists of the Islamic State of the Iraq and the Levant, who term them "devil worshippers". They thought they were safe in an enclave in the north of the country, where they were protected by Kurdish forces, even when ISIL's Toyota truck-mounted warriors came sweeping through Iraq.

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But then, on Saturday, a second wave attacked, and overwhelmed their biggest town, Sinjar, driving them out and into the desert. About 100,000 are thought to have made it to camps and other places of refuge further north, inside the Kurdish Autonomous Region itself. But thousands more - estimates range from 10,000 to 40,000 people - are now surrounded in the fierce heat of the Iraqi desert, all exit routes cut off.

Some are preparing to stand and fight, others are simply hiding out in caves in the desert hills. Some are already burying their children, as they succumb to dehydration and the hostile conditions. It is an extraordinary failure to protect a vulnerable community - though whose failure it was will be subject to much debate.

The Yazidi sect's situation has always been precarious. Photo: AFP

But no one will be able to say it could not have been foreseen. The more prejudiced of their Sunni Muslim neighbours always despised the Yazidis, using them as bogeymen to frighten their children.

There is reason for their association with devil worshippers, though hardly a good one. The semi-deity worshipped by the Yazidis, known as Malek Tawwus, or the Peacock Angel, can easily be identified with Satan - the Peacock Angel, like Lucifer, fell from grace, but in the Yazidis' eyes was pardoned and restored to glory.

And so, to the Yazidis' enemies, Malek Tawwus really is Satan, and, if you are a jihadist of the ISIL variety, that means they can be killed with impunity.

About 100,000 Yazidis are thought to have made it to places of refuge inside the Kurdish Autonomous Region. Photo: Reuters

While many in the Middle East see Yazidism as a breakaway sect from Islam or Christianity, it is in fact an entirely separate, pre-existing religion with its own belief system. Yazidis do not believe in heaven or hell, but in reincarnation, which they call the soul "changing its clothes".

Their religious practices certainly mark them out. They never wear the colour blue. They are not allowed to eat lettuce. Many of the men wear their hair in long plaits, while others keep wildly thick, untrimmed moustaches.

They practise a form of institutionalised elopement, where a man must "kidnap" his bride with her own consent, but without her parents' knowledge. They believe one of their holy books, the Black Book, was stolen by the British in colonial times and is kept somewhere in London.

While the origins of their beliefs are shrouded in mystery, they have kept their religion alive through the Talkers - Yazidi men who are taught the entire text of the missing book by heart as children and pass it on to their own sons in turn.

Far from being devil worshippers, they find even the mention of the word "Satan" so profoundly offensive that Iraqis used to warn visitors to their villages in the Sinjar region not to say it.

Less mysterious is the history of persecution to which they have been subject. It is not just for religion; ethnically Kurdish, they are a minority within a minority, in a tough region. In Turkey, they were once forced to carry identity cards that listed their religion as "XXX", until almost the entire community fled to Europe. In Georgia and Armenia, they were forced out by nationalist movements after the fall of the Soviet Union, while in Syria most fled religious persecution.

In Iraq alone they survived, though their situation has been precarious, particularly since the rise of Sunni extremist groups in the region around them during Iraq's civil war. In 2007, 23 Yazidis were taken from a bus and shot dead in a sectarian killing, and there have been individual murders since then. The Yazidis are not without their own darker side, and the 2007 shootings were thought to be a reprisal after a Yazidi woman was allegedly stoned to death for converting to Islam and marrying a Muslim man.

Now there are fears for their continued existence in their homelands.

"We are calling for the outside world to send military assistance," says Telim Tolan of Denge Ezidiyan, a Yazidi expat organisation in Germany.

"If help doesn't come soon, I'm not afraid a genocide will start," says Mr Tolan. "I'm afraid it will already be finished."